The Long Now

The Long Now A peer learning journey experience for individuals August, 2017 - August, 2018

What is your long work, the purpose of your life that spans time, organizations and careers? How does the long work present itself in your life now? What does it ask of you and provide to you? How do you hope to develop it into the future?

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he Long Now is a peer learning experience. It offers a rare opportunity to sustain a conversation that matters among peers regarding the work that you care most about, and exploring where your skills and life experience overlap with what the world needs.

My role as facilitator and guide is to sustain the inquiry among a group of peers who can help to transform each other’s awareness. My responsibility is to listen deeply to each individual’s aspiration, to assemble a collection of peers who can best support and challenge one another, and to create the safe and fertile conditions for provocative questions to be answered through the wisdom of time and experience.

What does your inner voice say about what is most needed now?

What are the commitments you need to make to yourself to continue this long work?

And how do you respond to this time of political upheaval and a new social and moral landscape in America?

The purpose of the Long Now is to create space to consider what must be faced in order to reveal and sustain the path of one’s life. My friend Hank Lentfer put it this way: “grace is when the arrow finds its mark, when we find all the creative energy we need to do the work we were meant to do.” How does one discern that mark and let loose that arrow? After missing the mark, how do we find the energy to take aim again and again? Or after hitting that mark over and over, how does one imagine a new target farther away that may be hard to see?

James Baldwin wrote, “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” I expect our group to take up some of the questions that have challenged my own life: What is the right scale of my life work that recognizes my gifts and my limitations? How does privilege show up in my life making some things possible and other things impossible? How do I merge deed and creed in more aspects of my life? What enables my arrow to hit its mark, and what makes me miss that mark altogether? What sustains my creative energy?

I believe that a fulfilling, creative life of service pushes one further and further into realms that we know less and less about.

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fter the group comes together in the spring of 2017, I will interview each participant to better understand their motivations and expectations for joining the journey. These interviews become primary data in the creation of a curriculum for each of three trips that will enable us to address these questions.

The backbone of the Long Now is three trips we make together over ten months to the mountains of Vermont, to parish of New Orleans, and to the north coast of California. A final summation retreat will bring us back to Vermont. The journey itself is an essential aspect of the curriculum because within each trip is a model for experiential learning: each trip has a place to begin, a place to leave behind, a place at which to arrive. In leaving one place behind, we face the deep grooves of our lives by intentionally stepping outside them. In experiencing new places, people and ways of life, we create openings for our own creativity.

My experience is that the distinction between a great folly and a great work is often very hard to see.

The purpose of The Long Now is to create space for perspective, inquiry and peer support around the difficult work of this discernment.

What does Peer mean?

To look keenly or with difficulty at someone or something.

To come into view; appear.

A person with the ability as another specified person.

From Old French peer, from Latin par ‘equal.’

What’s Peer Learning?

People learning with and from each other as fellow learners without any implied authority to any individual.

The acquisition and sharing of knowledge and skill through active helping and supporting among matched companions.

A two-way, reciprocal learning activity where social and emotional gains attract as much interest as cognitive gains.

We’ll convene for the first time in August at The Refuge at Knoll Farm, for three nights, to meet one another, share our purpose and work, and create the beginning of individual study plans for the year.

Each participant can expect the following from the Long Now Learning Journey: • Between the trips, I will support each participant with coaching to connect individually on his or her study plan and evolving questions • A safe, confidential, supportive environment in which to re-think and affirm • A small group of peers engaging in similar questions around courage, choice and purpose • Creation of a personal study plan for the journey • 6 coaching calls with Peter • 12 days of learning experiences in three different inspiring places • Tuition on a sliding scale: $2,000 – $3,500 Transportation, lodging and food is extra and we will always arrange for the most economical option that meet the group’s needs, both programmatically and financially. For your planning purposes, our goal on lodging and food is never to exceed $175.00 per day and to aim for less. Travel will be different for every member of the group depending upon their home base.

In November, we’ll travel to Point Reyes, California for three nights.

In March to New Orleans for three nights.

We’ll end in August back at The Refuge at Knoll Farm for three nights.

What’s a Learning Journey?

A facilitated experience sustained over time and place that challenges orthodoxies, honors people, and transforms skills, goals and emotional intelligence of individuals.

Join Us.

Would you like to join me and a group of peers on this year long journey of discovery?

Please contact me with your interest as well as any questions you may have. You can also contact Anna Nasset who will be handling logistical arrangements.

Peter Forbes: Facilitator: peter@perforbes.org Anna Nasset: Coordinator: anna@newlearningjourney.org or 802.496.5686

Programming developed by: Peter Forbes &